Saint Augustine Quotes

What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.

America has a rap sheet. You can't police the world and tell the world how to act when you're just as bad yourself.

A subject’s faults a subject may proclaim A monarch’s errors are forbidden game.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

Many journalists seem to believe that we have become little different from our enemies.

Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

The United States is considered a puritanical society by many Western nations. For example, they can't believe we hassle public servants like General David Petraeus because he had a mistress. In France, if a powerful man doesn't have a mistress, he's considered a wimp.

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

Washington has a tendency to hold other powers to standards that it routinely flaunts - plain and simple.

Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themselves grabbed the most fundamental of human rights from the people of the Third-World countries.

Reagan and Bush... made the world safe for hypocrisy.

We're all slight hypocrites who fall short of our ideals.

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

... mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins like pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate.

Where there is a sea there are pirates.

Champagne Socialist

Cops and criminals aren't that different. They just play by different sets of rules. And the lines get blurred. There's no such thing as 'right' and 'wrong.' There's always a grey area. There are always hypocrisies.

Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.

There are certain people you're allowed to pick apart and certain people you're not.